What is Cerbos
You define what every user, service and AI agent is allowed to do. Cerbos enforces it across your applications, gateways and workloads, and provides evidence of every decision.
What Cerbos does
End-to-end authorization management platform that authorizes every identity, governs every action and proves every decision.
Enterprise authorization
Fine-grained, contextual and continuous authorization across apps, gateways, workloads and AI agents, with a full audit trail behind every decision. Teams gain gain audit-ready evidence for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, NIS2, and DORA.
Externalized
Authorization logic sits in one layer rather than in application code. A permission change is a policy update instead of a code deploy, and access can be revoked on the next request, in seconds.
Running at scale
Cerbos is in production at thousands of companies and makes more than 2 billion authorization decisions a month, for people, services and AI agents. It runs wherever your systems run, in the cloud, self-hosted, on-premise or air-gapped.
What we stand for
Our mission is to make authorization easy.
Not scattered through application code. One place to see and change what every identity can do.
The origin of our name
Our company name comes from Cerberus.
A conversation about protecting things
We were talking about ways of protecting things, which turned into a conversation about dogs, which ended at the one dog nobody gets past.
The dog at the gate
Cerberus decided whether you could pass. That is authorization, and it is the job we do.
Cerberus became Cerbos
We shortened the name, drew the dog, and Cerbie became our mascot. He has been our logo ever since.
The Cerbos team
Cerbos was founded in 2021 by Emre Baran, Alex Olivier and Charith Ellawala, three people who kept rebuilding authorization at every company they were part of. They decided to build it once, properly, so nobody else has to. The team is headquartered in London and is fully remote.
Emre Baran
CEO and Co-Founder
Alex Olivier
CPO and Co-Founder
Charith Ellawala
CTO and Co-Founder
Award-winning technology, built for security and scale
With a strong open source foundation, AuthZEN compliance, and multiple industry awards, Cerbos has been recognized as a secure and reliable authorization software since 2021. Our CPO Alex Olivier co-chairs the OpenID AuthZEN working group.
API World 2025, Best in
Microservices Infrastructure
API World 2022, Best in API
Security
HackerNoon Startup of the
Year 2024
Startups.100 2025
Intellyx Digital Innovator
2023
Our investors
Cerbos is backed by a group of investors who believe in the future of externalized authorization.
“It’s weird to say an outside company has our back, but Cerbos does.”
SOC 2 & ISO audit-ready
AI agents secured
Threat detection
“We can trace every permission, investigate suspicious behavior, and answer questions about who did what, when, and why. We’ve gone from guesswork to forensic-level auditing across humans, machines, and everything in between.”
Rob Crowe
Principal Engineer, Utility Warehouse
Connect with us
Our team is active in the Cerbos community Slack. If you have a question or want to compare notes with other people building with Cerbos, drop in!